“I haven’t actually dreamt of my tongue,” claims the young Surinamese artist Xavier Robles de Medina over the phone from Amsterdam, where he currently resides. This is good news because according to the Lacondon tribe-Maya peoples who live in the jungles in the Mexican state of Chiapas near the southern border of Guatemala-dreaming about your tongue is a bad omen. The world can only wonder how many “tongue dreams” took place across the globe in the lead up to Trump’s inauguration. Thankfully, for high art's sake, there are no direct Trump allusions in Robles de Medina’s first solo exhibition at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, if you dream of your tongue, beware.

“We have all these strange dream interpretations,” says Robles de Medina, still referencing the Lacondon. “If you dream of tacos, you’ll see an anteater. If you dream of a party, you’ll be bored for a long time. To me, that’s quite similar to the folklore and culture that I’m used to in Surinam. They [the Surinamese] also have these strange dream interpretations, like, if you dream of a snake, a woman in your family is pregnant.” All phallic jokes aside; one thing tends to lead to another.

Robles de Medina, who is a somewhat shy, but extremely bright and contemplative young man, named his current show after an essay in Eliot Weinberger’sAn Elemental Thing. “What resonates with me so much,” says the artist, pausing to consider the ouroboros-like nature of his process, “is it’s kind of what I do in interpreting the photos that I source-history books, news, factual sources-I crop them and turn them into something that’s more poetic in some ways. It’s kind of what drew me to the book in the first place.”

An Elemental Thing, as a phrase, could in fact be used to describe both the artist and his highly detailed drawings, which provide compartmentalized, figurative hints to a larger emotional and political puzzle, which for Robles de Medina, continually operates on both a micro and macro scale. “There’s this very long history between this triangle of Surinam, the Netherlands, and New York City (a former Dutch colony),” explains Robles de Medina. “In the Treaty of Breda, the Dutch and the English traded Surinam and New York City. [This is] not necessarily anything I literally addressed in the work, but for me, personally, it’s a cool coincidence.”

Robles de Medina was born in Surinam, along with his parents and grandparents. At 16 he ventured off to boarding school at St. Clare’s in Oxford, England and eventually launched his professional art career in New York City. Now he’s back in the Netherlands. The idea of Robles de Medina’s contemporary experience mirroring that of the colonial narrative all being chalked up to coincidence, as we’ve come to learn, falls a bit short of a larger universal truth; this being the enduring geopolitical realities of a post-colonial country and the quiet but systemic forces that tie a young life to the past. This is the subtle but elemental force that bleeds through Robles de Medina’s work.

“It’s not overtly politically driven,” says the artist of his show. “I prefer to be inspired by politics and history and what’s happening in the news and what the state of the world is, but I try not to be didactic and tell people what to think. It’s not about imposing my politics in the work at all.”

There are some explicitly political aspects in a few of the works, however. One small, untitled work features several silhouettes of, as the artist puts it, “these men with hats,” all sourced from a photo of Javanese immigrants coming into Surinam at the beginning of the 20th century. “This is a literal depiction of the act of immigrating,” says the artist, acknowledging that this process will continue from generation to generation, and will always be contentious, regardless of the flags and landmasses involved.

In a sister-piece, “We continued drinking in silence,” 2016, which features an emotive reaction to the signing of the Surinamese Independence Papers in 1975, the inner emotional turmoil is palpable in the featured human subject. “I think that year was particularly divisive,” says the artist. “Half of the country’s population moved away, particularly to the Netherlands, but also to the United States and the rest of the world. Over 400,000 people left Surinam at that time. That particular drawing is very much about a similar situation to what I’ve been observing in US politics, the election, the inauguration and also European politics as well.”

What’s interesting about this time in history (2017), is the percolating physical and existential conflict between those who are xenophobic nationalists and those who are true international citizens; modern folks buoyed by the exponential capacities through which technology can connect us, multiplied by an inherent artistic drive to expand one’s heart, mind and soul through travel and rigorous cross-cultural, interpersonal experience. Robles de Medina, falls into this latter category, of course, especially considering he’s spent the last three years following Catinca Tabacaru, his inimitable gallerist (herself a Romanian-American and former UN human rights attorney) around the world for adventurous residency programs, most notably the Zig Zag Zim arts incubator at Dzimbanhete Arts Interactions in Harare, Zimbabwe, as well as numerous international art fairs and other invaluable residency programs.

“In her words, she [Tabacaru] says, ‘Put yourself in the world where you win.’ It’s interesting for me, coming from her because she’s the most hard-working woman I know,” says Robles de Medina, whose own work takes painstaking time and focus. “She just doesn’t stop. I’m always shocked and feel exhausted. I can’t keep up with her energy.”

Xavier’s path from Surinam to Catinca was an interesting journey in its own right. After graduating from St. Clare’s, Oxford, where Robles de Medina (who at a young age showcased near-prodigy-level technical art skills) thankfully agreed with an administrator that it might be more prudent to explore studio art classes over the extremely difficult Chinese, found his way to The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), where he graduated in November, 2012 with a dual major in Animation and Studio Art/Art History. A short time later, he accepted an internship with Dumbo Arts Center (DAC), which facilitated his first move to Brooklyn. “Those three months that I lived in Brooklyn, I got familiarized with how NYC works, how Brooklyn works-finding apartments and subletting-and a bit of the art world as well,” says the artist.

That summer, during his internship in New York, Xavier met Christopher Arabadjis, an artist, professor, former software engineer and theoretical nuclear physics buff. There are traces of Arabadjis’ technique in Xavier’s work-the mathematical precision, the deftness of touch. “Chris is like a mentor to me,” notes the young artist. “ He [Arabadjis] finished his masters at Pratt in the fine art department and also studied physics at Umass. We met at an opening, where he mentioned he had a friend who worked at Takashi Murakami’s studio. Chris helped get my portfolio seen by them and they invited me for an interview to work as a studio assistant. That was the beginning of my pull back.”

After applying, Robles de Medina didn’t hear from Murakami’s Queens-based studio for a month. “What if I’m here and I don’t find a job?” the artist remembers thinking. Luckily, a fretful trip through Craigslist brought Xavier to an atypical post for a gallery internship in NYC. “It was by far the longest message in the job listings. It was quite detailed,” he says, chuckling a bit. “I thought if this woman [Tabacaru] went through all this work to create this job posting for an intern, that says something.” Xavier landed the internship on the spot and just two days later, found himself holding down Tabacaru’s booth at Scope, 2013. “If I remember correctly, she was showing Gail Stoicheff, Andreas Stanislav, Carly Ivan Garcia, Yapci Ramos, and Justin Orvis Steimer, who did a performance where he painted live.”

This is significant, considering many of the aforementioned artists have since coalesced into more than a roster or tenuous working collective, but something more akin to a family. This has a lot to do with Tabacaru’s own international perspective, let alone her leadership skills. Perhaps what leads immigrants and international citizens to work so hard in fostering and maintaining enduring work relationships, is the fact that they don’t have a “native,” ingrained family to lean on and take for granted. This is a similar phenomenon that many Americans who move to New York from out of state experience, presumably to a lesser degree. This is what makes Tabacaru and her chosen home of New York City special; both are essential, micro and macro beacons of hope for the core tenets upon which this great country was founded.

After several months under Tabacaru’s wing, Takashi Murakami’s people finally reached out. Xavier accepted the studio assistant position but kept in touch with his gallerist and her artists. Towards the end of his run with Murakami's studio, after being further schooled in the Japanese artist's many mixed-media practices, he saw time running out on his US residency. With only two weeks left in the States, before an inevitable return to Amsterdam, Tabacaru made an impromptu visit to Robles de Medina’s Bushwick studio.

Tabacaru, who had yet to procure a brick and mortar gallery, commandeered two works and brought them to the 2013 Beethoven Festival in Chicago. She sold both pieces and the rest is history. “She makes it look easy because maybe for her, it is easy,” says Robles de Medina, who almost relegated his artistic skills to that of a hobby. “Art is all she’s consumed with. She loves it so much. She just doesn’t stop talking about art or making plans. This is most inspiring part of what I’ve taken from her: total commitment.”